Inside the cadaver lab that dissects dead bodies for science

Brut America

"Maybe I should start my own cadaver lab, because that's a normal idea."  His creepy yet fascinating videos from inside a cadaver lab attract millions online. Meet Jonathan Bennion ...

Transcript

00:00Small little warning, I'm about to show you a close-up of a real human brain in three, two,

00:06one. Look how amazing this thing is. This is the right half of a real human brain.

00:19You can see the stomach down on the tray here. It's often referred to as this

00:23J-shaped organ. This is a sagittal cut through the head and this will give us an idea of the

00:28upper airways. And if we take a look here, we can obviously see the nose, the mouth here.

00:33Most people think when they come in here, it's going to smell.

00:36Cadaver labs have come a long ways. If you were to walk in this lab with me right now,

00:39you'd feel like it smelled like a normal room. This is the actual right testis here. Look how

00:45amazing that is inside. And if you look closely in there, it almost looks like there's these

00:49little stringy type things here. When I was a little kid, I always was interested in the human

01:06body and medicine from whether it was sports, health and wellness. And when I went to college,

01:10I thought, okay, well, I'm going to do something in healthcare and took an anatomy class

01:15at the University of Utah. And part of the class was going to the cadaver lab once a week. And we

01:19were learning about the heart and the teaching assistant literally hands me this human heart.

01:24And I just instinctively, I'm like, okay, I'm grabbing it. I'm holding it. And I remember

01:27having one little second of like, oh my gosh, this is a real human heart. And then it just

01:33changed like, this is the coolest thing ever. Give me more. And so I was one of those.

01:38Is the tongue, skeletal, cardiac, or smooth muscle tissue?

01:43Skeletal. I would literally go in sometimes like 2 a.m. and pull out the cadavers, study, learn from

01:50all these different amazing body donors. And then I just fell in love with teaching.

02:08Anatomy is important to so many other professions rather than just med students. And one day,

02:14maybe this is TMI, I was sitting on the toilet and I said,

02:20maybe I should start my own cadaver lab because that's a normal idea.

02:32We have this awesome relationship with them where high school students get access to the cadavers

02:37and kind of get this head start and we still run our business model out of it.

02:44This particular body is one of our newer bodies, so we haven't done any dissection yet.

02:49However, this is a female that died of Alzheimer's disease in her late 70s.

02:53Any of the tissues or structures that belong to that body, we keep track of them because at the

02:58end of the time, we return all the tissues that belong to that body back to the donor program

03:03and they get cremated. And then the ashes go to a designated site. For the most part,

03:08we use embalmed bodies just because of the nature of how we teach these bodies. We need them to last.

03:13I have a body on the back table back there that I brought in in December of 2012. I think it's

03:18a really cool thing, a really cool anatomical gift that these people will give and we have

03:22to respect it the best we can.

03:35What does vaping do to the body? Is it bad? And if so, how bad?

03:40Okay, so here's your cool human fact for the day. Your heart is covered in a connective tissue layer

03:45called the pericardium. I still feel a little bit weird calling myself an influencer. I just do.

03:50We're geeky teachers that have been lucky enough to use this platform to teach people.

03:56If we inspire people to learn, learn and learn how to learn and love the human body,

04:02I think I could probably be okay being an influencer in that situation.

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